Going Postal

Saturday, September 17th, 2011 at
15:43

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Not too long ago was Jimmy’s (not his real name) birthday and on that day Jimmy went totally postal shortly after he started opening his gifts. Most of the guests didn’t have a clue as to why he went over the edge and started yelling, screaming and threw everybody out of his house, ending what had been up to that moment a great birthday party, leaving the guests standing in front of his house stunned and wondering what happened that could drive a normally super friendly guy like Jimmy that far over the edge.

I knew but out of respect for Jimmy’s privacy I wasn’t about to tell anyone.

I’m telling it here because it’s an interesting story and I’ve changed names places and enough details that won’t affect the story. Besides, these people don’t read blogs. For that matter, most of them avoid reading anything because it’s too much effort (a growing disease these days I think. Short attention span is a modern epidemic.)

You see, without knowing what it meant one of the gifts somebody gave him was a bulova watch. To put it mildly Jimmy has a problem with bulova watches. When he was a teenager he had a traumatic experience that involved one.

A neighbor of his, a woman that weighed around 385 pounds, decided for some reason that to this day nobody knows and she never explained. To work on her backyard garden one afternoon in the nude. She did this at a time when Jimmy was typically in his backyard.

He saw everything of course. The sight terrified him in the worst way. He also saw the bulova watch that was the only thing she was wearing. His eyes clamped onto that watch and he didn’t look away from it. Instead he focused on it to the exclusion of all else in an effort to not see the rest of her.

I know that people are probably asking themselves “why didn’t he just look away or go inside?” and that’s a fair question. However it’s one that nobody has the answer to, including Jimmy. All he knows is that he froze at the sight of her. She knew he was there and could see her because she stopped to smile and wave at him. This is when he spotted the watch and put all of his focus on it.

Eventually she went inside and after a while he unfroze enough to go inside himself and try to forget what he’d seen. Ever since then he’s had this hatred of bulova watches. Getting one for a birthday present was just too much and broght the whole thing back to him.

Mr. Helpful showed up a day after that birthday party with a hammer and a box of bulova watches. An hour later Jimmy was back to his old self again, feeling really bad about how he’d acted toward everybody. Enough so that he spent three days apologizing to everyone.